If you thought your job was tough and your family life strained, check out King Oedipus. He dapperly solves a question for the Sphinx and is rewarded with the throne of Thebes, where he settles into a comfy royal routine. A wife (albeit older), four kids, the admiration of Thebans great and small.

But then a plague hits, and Apollo’s oracle announces that the sickness is punishment for the murder of King Laius years ago. The citizens of Thebes must uncover the murderer before the plague can be lifted, and Oedipus vows to find and banish the criminal. He makes a mission out of this decree.

With each new clue about Laius’ death and the unexpected news of his own early beginnings as a foundling, Oedipus gets a little plagued himself. There’s that niggling memory of long ago when another oracle revealed that Oedipus was destined to lie with his mother and murder his father.

It turns out to be a wildly tragic day in old B.C. Thebes. It’s the kind of event that had the potential to give countless therapists an entire mythology with which to explain human development.

Aquila, a transatlantic touring company that specializes in Greek drama, has a handy way of explicating this very type of reverberating story. Under the direction of Robert Richmond, this adaptation of “Oedipus the King,” written sensibly by company co-founder Peter Meinick with Paul Woodruff, has a dreamlike quality that makes this production more like a ballet than a brush with one of the most resounding dramas in literature.

Masks, hypnotizing choreography, moody electronic music, alacritous lighting and tight performance spaces are the trademarks of Aquila, which is in its third year of touring in Maine. The six-person cast for “Oedipus” slipped into and out of a circular performing area with incisive glissades and spirited grace. They created serious moments with great poignancy, but weren’t afraid to be humorous.

In a final moment, when the blinded Oedipus laments before his children, who are also his siblings, he rattles off a litany of terrors and spits out the show’s only profanity which such effectiveness that it slices right to the core of this drama. He is brother and father, husband and son. In that moment, Freud’s great complex echoes from antiquity into the face of modern humanity. That powerfully artistic impact is the other signature of Aquila productions.

When Aquila performed “King Lear” last November at the Maine Center, the show ended unexpectedly because an onstage curtain went up in flames. “Oedipus the King,” which will be performed later this year in New York City, expertly avoided pyrotechnics but delivered a fiery drama.